Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 128: The Savages, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Susan and David fell in love, sharing special moments in the heat of a Dalek conquest. Ian and Barbara spent almost two years trying to get back home, and finally managed it in a fully-functional Dalek time machine. Vicki remained in ancient Troy to convince her love that she hadn't betrayed him.

Katarina sacrificed herself to give her friends a chance at escape. Brett Vyon was wrongly shot down in cold blood by his own sister in the pursuit of justice, and she then met her fate when brought up against the might of the Daleks' Time Destructor.

Steven Taylor… was pretty much booted off the TARDIS when the Doctor saw an opportunity to get rid of him. Ah. Something's not right, there. When I started this story, I said that one of the two things I knew about it was that Steven departed in Episode Four. Had I not known that, though, and had just been watching through blindly… I don't think I'd have known this was his final tale. There's nothing wrong with the reasons for his departure: The Savages have seen enough from him to want him as their leader, and the Doctor concurs. But it comes from nowhere, and looking at the tele snaps, Steven himself even looks confused by the way things are unfolding.

Every time a companion has left the series so far (or, at least, in the case of the 'regular' companions, for which there;s no debate over), I've praised how well it's been handled. There's always plenty of little hints in the story that the time has come, and when we reach the end it only feels natural that they should be on the wrong side of the TARDIS doors when it departs. What this story needed was a few instances of Steven musing that there was a 'better way' to rule this planet, and a solution that would allow the two peoples of the world to live in peace.

We needed a few more moments of his imparting wisdom to the Savages, really stepping up and showing them that he knew what he was doing. As it is, we know he'll probably make a pretty good job of things, because we've been following his journey for some time now, but they've only known him for a few days! It's a shame to see the age of 'sudden departures' coming into play here (and even more prominently in the next story), knowing that it will stretch out across a good deal more companion exits in the future.

Before listening to this episode, I heard a Peter Purves interview online. I think it had been cobbled together from a number of sources, but it was pretty well done, and I certainly enjoyed it. In the interview, Peter made a statement that I've heard him say on a number of occasions before now - that he'd like the Doctor to return to the world of the Savages, and find that Steven has become a total despot. The more I think about it, the more I really like the idea, and I think it could work. It's almost needed as a counter balance to the sudden departure - Steven just doesn't know what he's doing, so he makes things worse. I'd love to hear something like this… maybe Peter needs to pitch the idea to Big Finish?

I'll speak about this episode as a whole in a moment, but first I want to just take a moment to think over how fantastic Steven has been in the series. For years and years, now, I've always simply listed Ian as being my favourite First Doctor companion. Having done his stories in order, followed by Stevens, though, I think it's fair to say that my allegiance has switched. I think it has something to do with the length of time that both characters have stayed with the TARDIS. By the end of Ian and Barbara's time in the series, I was just sick of them. I'd stopped enjoying their adventures, and I think it had a negative effect on the Second Series for me.

Steven has stuck around for just about half as long as those two did, and he leaves now with me wanting to see a bit more from him. I'm not really ready for him to go. Even if it's just another story or two, to round out the season, I'm keen to have more from him. That, I think, is the secret. Get the companion out before i tire of them. A similar thing happened with Amy Pond - while I was never overly keen on her from the beginning, by the time that Season Seven rolled around I'd just had enough. I didn't care about the character. Now that we've embarked on this second half of the series, with Janna-Louise lighting up the screen every week, it feels fresh and new. Fantastic.

On the whole, I think The Savages has been something of a surprise. It's never been a story that people often speak about, but rather just lump it in as part of the 'missing' episodes. It hasn't got the reputation of something like Marco Polo or The Web of Fear to pull it out from the crowd. Having just had a look at the DWM 'Mighty 200' poll from 2009, in which readers were asked to rate all the stories up to that point, The Savages came in at #162. Out of 200! Even Love & Monsters came in nine places higher, and a large proportion of fandom seems to hate that story!

I have to wonder if it simply is a case that people just don't know about this story. That's pretty much the boat I was in, knowing it was there at the end of Season Three, but not really knowing what it was about. In many ways, it's Doctor Who by numbers: and there's lots of similarities to other tales throughout (I've compared it to bits of The Keys of Marinus, The Space Museum, The Celestial Toymaker, and The Gunfighters over the last few days), and there's bits of it that will crop up so many times in the future of the programme (mostly the look of the TARDIS stood in the quarry) that it feels a bit like we've seen it all before… but everything here is done really very well!

I'm so desperately keen to give this episode an '8'. I've really enjoyed it on the whole, and the scene of people trashing the lab must have looked fantastic, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Letting Steven go so suddenly and with no warning is too unforgivable. I'll be lowering the score a little, but moving The Savages right up my list of 'stories I'd love to see recovered soon please'. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.

7/10 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 127: The Savages, Episode Three

Dear diary,

You can sort of tell that we’re reaching the tail-end of William Hartnell’s time in the role, now. In the first couple of years, ‘holiday spotting’ was something that each character went through for maybe two episodes a season. Usually, it was a case of seeing which regular had the least screen-time, and spent it away from the others. Now, the Doctor is taking more and more time away from the screen. He is in this episode, but he doesn’t really do a whole lot more than groan a bit.

I made a similar point during The Gunfighters, that the Doctor seemed to be carrying less and less of the action – and obviously The Celestial Toymaker sees him invisible for a large chunk of the time. There’s a real sense of the Doctor (and Hartnell) starting to slow up, which is a real shame. After the heights he’s hit at points recently (I’m thinking mostly of how fantastic he looks during some of The Time Meddler and Masterplan) I’m sad to see him being whittled down.

It means that we’ve got today, as in The Celestial Toymaker, a chance to think about replacing him. There we had the suggestion that he may come back as a different actor, here it’s seeing how another actor may take on the part, while still playing it in the style of Hartnell himself. Frederick Jaeger does a great job of impersonating the Doctor: I was stood giggling to myself for a while as it happened. It really is spot-on as impressions go, and it works quite well. It’s an interesting idea for the transference, though are we to assume that this doesn’t happen when they transfer the Savages? It’s only because the Doctor is a time traveller, or at least a ‘higher’ life form?

Fun as it is to see here on this occasion, I can’t imagine anyone playing the part as Hartnell’s Doctor for any sustained period of time. It’s a very good impression, but it’s just not him. The biggest shame is that, after today, we’ve only got another thirteen episodes before he leaves, so I want to soak up as much Hartnell as I can before then – to misquote the Tenth Doctor, I don’t want him to go!

Still, Hartnell not being in the episode much means that Peter Purves and Jackie Lane are left to carry the majority of the episode. The Wife in Space blog once made a point that they ‘should have called the show Ian’. At this stage, they might as well be calling it Steven. It wouldn't last all that long (I know he's off in the next episode, even if this story has yet to signpost it!), but it's good enough, 'cos I'm still really liking Steven as a companion.

I was worrying yesterday that things were about to take a sharp downturn, with not enough plot to sustain the remaining 50-minute running time of the story. Thankfully, that's not yet happened, and it's been averted by clever use of… Episode Three Syndrome!?! I'm sure I've spoken about this before, but I always think that three episodes is the optimum length for most of 20th-century Doctor Who. There's more than a few of the four-part stories that could stand to lose about an episode's worth of material from the latter half.

I tend to call it 'Episode Three Syndrome' - that feeling that you need to fill twenty-five minutes of screen time before the climax, so you mostly have the characters running up and down corridors, getting captured and escaping, and ending the episode in more-or-less the same position that they started in.

Here, all of that happens. Steven and Dodo are pursued by the guards all the way to the cave homes of the Savages, who help to shelter them, and lead them down a tunnel in an attempt to hide. They're followed all the way, though, until a guard has them cornered… and they escape! They hurry back to the city to free the Doctor, who is still begin held in the lab. They retrieve him, take him out into the corridor, where they're then gassed and are under threat from a deadly gas.

Most of this could probably have come at the start of Episode Four in a (very) condensed form: Steven and Dodo are helped by a Savage to enter the city, they rescue the Doctor, but then get gassed. It really works, though. It allows us to see more of the Savages as a people and helps to give them more depth. It's also a good thing that the tele snaps make their caves look impressive. We've seen Christopher barry directing in caves before, and he's always done a good job of it, but this looks much better than I'm used to.

And then all the stuff in the corridor at the end looks fantastic, too. I've already praised the design of this corridor in previous entries, but it looks great with the smoke billowing down it. The scene is then enhanced by William Hartnell's performance. I know I've said all he really does is stumble around and groan a lot, but looking at the tele snaps… how un-nerving does he look? There's one particular shot (It's the fourth one from the end of page 65 in the new DWM special, for anyone following along at home), where he's stood between Steven and Dodo, and he's completely out of it.

It almost looks as though he's had a stroke, and it's a state that we've never seen the Doctor in before. It'd unsettling, and really helps to sell the threat of the transference to us. Forget the Daleks, this is what you should be scared of. Anything that can do this to the Doctor is not good…

7/10 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 126: The Savages, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Worryingly, I’m about to compare this story to The Space Museum. Yes! I can feel your collective shudder as you read that. What I mean is that there’s several elements common to both of these stories. Not particularly in-depth ones, but a few all the same. The main thing is that you’ve a group of ‘leaders’ (The Moroks/The Elders) and a group of people ready to rise up against them (The Xerons/The Savages). Were Vicki here, she’d have incited a rebellion by now. I’m guessing that’s going to be Steven or Dodo’s role before too long.

Then there’s the Doctor being strapped down and prepared for an experiment. In The Space Museum, it works as a threat because we’ve already seen the outcome – the Doctor and his friends frozen in the glass display cases. Here, the threat comes from having just watched the experiment performed on Nanina, and having seen the after-effects of the experiment on Wylda, who’s left to ‘recover’ outside the city.

There's also the fact that there's no easily identifiable 'monsters' in either of these two stories. In both cases, we're very much presented with a side of 'good' and 'bad', but there's no rubber suits on display, and no monster-of-the-week to latch onto. In some ways, it feels like this could be a historical story - there just happens to be a laboratory of advanced equipment and some light guns dropped in.

Thankfully, I’m enjoying this story more than I did The Space Museum. Today is a bit of a step down from yesterday (but then we’ve yet to have two 9/10 days in a row in this marathon, so it doesn’t come as a massive surprise), but it’s still kept me interested.

One of the things that I’m really enjoying is the look of this tale. Regular readers will know that I tend to experience the missing episodes by listening to the narrated soundtracks (recons tend to let my mind wander too much), so often my idea of what a story looks like is based on any surviving episodes, half-remembered photos from the tales, or simply what my head decides to come up with. The Myth Makers, for example was entirely in my mind, with the exception of the horse, which I can remember from plenty of promo images.

This time around, though, I’m supplementing the soundtracks by having a look through the recent First Doctor tele-snap special from the guys at DWM. I’m not sticking slavishly to following along the images in time with the soundtrack, it’s more of a case where I listen to the episode and have a glance over them. Occasionally, I've nipped over to the BBC's Doctor Who website, where they're available at a larger size.

And some of them are gorgeous! That corridor down to the lab is stunning (and there’s plenty of photos of it, too. I keep waiting for one to show it up as being awful, but it hasn’t happened yet. Hooray!). The design of the savages is pretty great, too. They’re one of those images from Doctor Who that I was always aware of but didn’t really know anything about them. When the story began, I figured that they were the Elders. Here they are, though, and they look fantastic. Bizarre, yes. Unsettling, perhaps. But great!

(Actually, in some ways, I'm a bit saddened that they aren't the Elders. In my mind, these strange, ancient men were savages who lived on a barren planet - most of the photos show them in the shrubbery - and that the story was going to involve them. Now I've experienced half the tale, I really love the idea of these people tracking the Doctor across time and space using primitive technology! Ah well.)

The tele-snaps also show plenty of the location filming from Doctor Who’s first alien quarry planet. From what we can see, it looks pretty impressive, and it actually works! It's on display better in the first episode than it is here today, but I'm really taken aback by it - Doctor Who's quarry planets are the stuff comedians have joked about for years, but they've nailed it on the first attempt!

The images don’t really give much of an indication of how the piece will have been directed, but thinking back over Chris Barry’s previous work, I can’t remember being floored by it. I’m choosing to imagine it as directed by Douggie Camfield instead – his camera work in those corridors would be gorgeous! That's not to say that Christopher Barry wouldn't have done a great job with it - but since I've got the free-reign to imagine…!

My worry now is where the story may go from here. It’s been quite a strong start, and the cliffhanger is pretty good as well (it’s always of interest when the Doctor is incapacitated like this, and separated from his companions – and, therefore, from help!). The danger is that rebellion seems the next logical step for the story, but I don’t know wether that’ll be enough to fill the next 50 minutes. The Space Museum didn’t really hold a great deal of interest for me once the rebellion started, so I’m concerned for the future of this one…

7/10 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 125: The Savages, Episode One

Dear diary,

The recently released Doctor Who Magazine special, which reprints a number of First Doctor-era teles naps (which I’m using to supplement the narrated soundtrack for this story) features an introduction for this story by Jonathan Morris, which describes The Savages as having 'the dubious distinction of being the lest-known Doctor Who story’. You know what? He’s not wrong.

There’s several eras of Doctor Who with which I’m not all that familiar. I can rattle off the order of stories pretty well for the most part, but Seasons Fifteen and Seventeen often get a bit muddled in my mind, for example. Ditto the latter few bits of the Hartnell era. I know now that it runs Savages / War Machines / Smugglers / Tenth Planet, but for a long time, this one and The Smugglers were pretty interchangeable in my mind. They both begin with ‘S’, they come at the tail end of the First Doctor’s tenure, and they don’t exist at all. Easily forgotten.

Add to that the fact that I don’t really know anything about this story - it features some people in heavy ‘old age’ make up, and Steven departs, that’s all I could tell you – and it doesn’t really shoot very high on my list of most anticipated stories. Which is a shame, really, because this first episode is brilliant!

I love it when this happens. I’ve sat down to listen to the first episode, not really knowing what to expect from the story, and I’ve been gripped from the word ‘go’. There’s a lot of the feeling of a Season One story in here – the Doctor and his companions arrive on a strange alien world which may not be where they think it is. The Doctor goes to explore (a concept that I praised quite a lot during An Unearthly Child and The Daleks), before they’re captured by the natives.

Once inside their city, the trio are treated like royalty. In many ways, it put me in mind of Morpheton from The Keys of Marinus, and despite what you might be thinking… that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Enough time has passed since then for me to quite enjoy it feeling similar in tone.

Crucially, though, there’s an added extra level to the proceedings here. The Elders of this civilisation aren’t just reacting to the arrival of the Doctor and his companions – they’ve been actively waiting for it: Plotting the TARDIS’ journey across time and space, and predicting his arrival (Interesting, since the ship until now has seemed fairly random in its landings. Is there a greater pattern to them that we perhaps can’t see?). It even leads to a great title being given to the Doctor - ‘You are known to us as the Traveller From Beyond Time’ – which helps to mythologise him even more to these people. It’s an interesting twist in the format, and one which really helped to drag me in pretty quick. I’ll be interested to see where they’re going with this, and if we discover any more about the way they’ve followed the Doctor’s adventures up to now (maybe they can pick up BBC transmissions, and his arrival was signposted by that week’s Radio Times?)

Steven and Dodo are paired away from the Doctor again, here. Surely they must be the companion team that spend the least amount of time actually with the Doctor? They’re relatively close-knit during The Ark, but spend only about ten minutes of The Celestial Toymaker together, and not a great deal more in The Gunfighters. Here, they’ve been separated as soon as we’re done with the cliffhanger reprise, and only briefly reunited later on.

It’s probably a good thing, then that they get plenty to do anyway. It’s through this pair that we first get our real exposure to the titular savages, and its via their tour of the city that we really get to see that there’s something sinister going on that’s neatly tucked away behind all this gloss and happiness. The best way I could think of describing it when Peter Purves’ narration talks of a guard slipping out of a concealed door was the ‘Utilidors’ at Disneyland – a hidden network of tunnels and staff areas tucked away from prying eyes for the use of the staff and accessed through secret doors dotted right across the park.

I’m hoping that the rest of the story continues in this vein – the Hartnell tale that I – probably – know the least about, and it could turn out to be the surprise hit of the run!

9/10